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There’s been a lot of attention over the last few days on the newly elected One Nation senator from Queensland, Malcolm Roberts. His election was a bit of a surprise, whereas we were confident that Pauline Hanson would win her seat, and her two other Senate colleagues were predicted as likely to win since election night.

Voters in the Australian Capital Territory go to the polls on October 15 to elect a new Legislative Assembly.

The current 17-member assembly will be replaced by an enlarged 25-member assembly. To achieve this, two new electorates called Murrumbidgee and Yerrabi have been added, and the central electorate of Molonglo has been shrunk and renamed Kurrajong.

One of the exciting things about the new Senate voting system is that we are on the verge of gaining a lot of new data on how people preference. The AEC has released the full dataset of Senate preferences for the last few elections, but the vast majority of preferences followed pre-registered tickets, so the data was less interesting.

Voters in the Queensland state seat of Toowoomba South voted today in a by-election to succeed Liberal National MP John McVeigh, who had resigned from the seat to run (successfully) for the federal seat of Groom.

I’d taken the night off after the last two weeks of counting so wasn’t able to cover it live, but there’s a few interesting things to look at in the result.

It’s now been two weeks since polls opened, and we are now getting very close to a conclusion of the House of Representatives count.

There is only one conventional seat still in play, which is Herbert. There will also be news today in Melbourne Ports which may either make the seat a serious seat in play or make it a clear Labor seat.

Herbert

The Liberal National Party, at the time of writing late on Friday night, led by 12 votes in Herbert.